Field of Disclosure
The disclosure generally relates to the field of receiving online content, in particular to receiving new feed data or search results for a user.
Description of the Related Art
A web feed is a data format used for providing periodically updated content to users who have subscribed to the feed. Typically, a content distributor publishes a web feed and provides through the web feed updated data for the subscribers to the feed. Examples of web feeds include feeds that provide news headlines on a news website, weather forecasts, stock tickers, the status information of online friends, and updates made to a user's online friends' web pages.
To receive a feed, a user typically first registers the feed with an aggregator running on the user's machine or elsewhere on the network. Once a feed is registered with an aggregator, the aggregator periodically checks for any updated data available on the feed and retrieves or pulls the updated or new feed data.
Because the aggregators are periodically checking for feed data, the user receives the new data when the aggregator is ready to retrieve the data and not when the new feed data becomes available. One way to address this problem is to increase the polling frequency of the aggregator such that the aggregator is pulling newly available data frequently enough that the newly available data is retrieved within a short time of being available. However, frequent polling for new content consumes the feed provider's resources and the feed providers therefore limit the aggregators' polling frequency.
Additionally, certain data is not created for feeds and the data provider does not differentiate between the newly available data and previously available data. Therefore, a user has no way of receiving only the newly available data, i.e. data that not been previously communicated to the user.